The privacy and/or security of a user of an electronic document has become an important issue during the information age. The creation and manipulation of a single document for business or personal use gives rise to concern about the accessibility of personal information about a user associated with the document. In today's business world, a single document may be intentionally or unintentionally accessible to numerous persons including fellow co-workers, competitors, and computer hackers. Consequently, users of a document have become very concerned about protecting their personal information associated with a document.
Many computer software applications require personal information from a user to install and/or run the application. For example, when a user installs an application on a computer, the application may ask the user to provide a user name or some other piece of personal information such as a company name or project name for installation purposes. In addition, the user may input other pieces of personal information into data fields of a document without prompting from the application. The user's name, or other piece of personal information, may be stored and later used by one or more operating features within the given application. Further, the user name or other piece of personal information may be automatically added to a document, created by the given application when one or more operating features within the given application are used.
One example of the use of personal information in a software application may be found in Microsoft Corporation's OFFICE 2000 application. In a document created by the OFFICE 2000 application, there are many places where personal information, such as the document author's name, is stored. The number of times and the places in which the author's name shows up in a document depends on the features used. For instance, in the Microsoft Corporation's WORD application, when you add a comment to a document, by default, an OFFICE 2000 application adds the name of the document author in the comment. Once the document has been saved with the comment, there is currently no way to remove the author's name from the comment other than by deleting the comment. Similarly, when you save the document, the WORD application automatically adds the name of the document author to the properties of the file. In order to remove the author's name, a user has to remember to go to the File Properties dialog, delete the author name from the File Properties dialog, and then resave the document.
What is needed in the art is a method of easily removing an author's or user's personal information associated with a document created by a software application.